Developer Survey: Java Developers Are The Saddest And C++ Programmers Are The Oldest

Short Bytes: The stereotypes associated with programmers are countless. To study them, using Microsoft’s Face API, Trestle Technology has performed a survey that tells some interesting results like — C++ programmers are the oldest, Swift programmers are beardy hipsters, and Java programmers are the saddest.

If we talk about the existing stereotypes in the programming world, you must have heard lines like no one likes coding in Java,C++ is for old people, and many more. To analyse the truth behind these stereotypes, the data engineers at Trestle Technology have written a tool.

You might know about Microsoft’s Project Oxford whose Face APIs can detect a face in the image and detect if that person is smiling, his/her gender and age, and the amount of facial hair.

The data engineers have combined the Face API with the data obtained from GitHub’s trending pages. This page shows the repositories in a particular language that are popular at that moment. You can also see profile pictures of the most prolific committers to these projects. Thus, this tool is able to get pictures of some of the busiest contributors for any given language.

While the data set used is small, it provides some fun results. The team doesn’t forget to mention a disclaimer —

“It should be noted that this is super non-scientific. Who knows how accurate the Face API is or how accurately a user’s GitHub profile picture maps to any aspect of their personality/identity. It’s also unclear whether the most prolific contributors to popular repositories accurately represent a community. Also, small sample sizes.“

Here are the results:

Age of programmers:

It turns out that Java programmers are the youngest and C++ programmers are the oldest.

Gender of programmers:

If we talk about the gender of programmers contributing to the top projects, this is a sad picture.

Smiles of programmers:

It’s time to accept the fact that a programmer’s job can be really hectic on some busy days. Perhaps, this is the reason why some developers failed to even muster a smile for their GitHub profile pictures.

Facial hair of programmers:

This test had the most interesting outcomes. It looks like Swift programmers are beardy hipsters, followed closely by Python, Perl, and JavaScript. This test was not normalized for gender.